Moo If This Hurts: The New Tech to Find Sick Livestock

Animals can't tell us when they're feeling under the weather, so researchers have used new systems relying on pedometers, RFID and infrared cameras to catch illnesses before they spread, or before it's too late for the animal.

If you get sick, you're likely to feel tired, sleep more and act differently. The same goes for animals such as cattle. And since cows can't tell farmers how they feel, researchers are using a variety of technologies to measure changes in animal behavior to diagnose illness before it causes more obvious and harmful symptoms.

In a study published recently in the Annual Proceedings of the British Society for Animal Science Conference 2011, researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. used radio-frequency ID tags (RFID) and leg-mounted pedometers to log the time cattle spent feeding, walking around and lying down. The Results allowed the scientists to diagnose—and treat—maladies they otherwise wouldn't have recognized, such as lameness, intestinal parasites and rumen acidosis, a common but potentially deadly gastrointestinal condition often caused by eating too much grain.

Study co-author and doctoral student Ollie Szyszka says early signs of illness are subtle and difficult to notice. It's especially problematic with modern agriculture, where fewer farmers raise more and more animals, and people interact with livestock less often. "You cannot pick up on these unless you look at the animals all day every day," she says. Technologies that allow people to monitor these small changes could allow for earlier treatment, saving money by preventing animals from spreading disease, enduring the complications of advanced illness or dying.

Attached to the cows' ears, the RFID tags send out a signal only when the cow sticks its head into the metal feeding trough to eat. Transmissions from a nearby scanning antenna activate the tag, which then broadcasts a signal identifying the animal; a computer attached to the scanning antenna records how long each cow feeds. The pedometer works by measuring the position and movement of the cows' legs, allowing it to record the animals' every step, and when they lie down. (In one phase of the study, they purposely infected cattle with a common parasite called the brown stomach worm. Pedometer measurements told researchers that these infected cattle lie down for longer periods of time than their parasite-free neighbors. After the study, the infected animals were treated with de-worming medicine.)

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Sandra Edwards, a researcher at Newcastle University uninvolved in the study, says this is the first time scientists have measured a variety of behaviors this wide. Edwards is currently working on a project to diagnose early illnesses in pigs based upon their drinking patterns—sick pigs generally drink less water. "There are many different behaviors to measure: feeding, drinking, general activity, laying bouts, and the like," she says. "The question is, which measure will be most sensitive and useful?"

That's an open question. Szyszka's supervisor and study co-author Ilias Kyriazakis says that so far, the cattle's laying bouts have been the most revealing of which animals are sick, although previous studies have found feeding information to be even more telling. The key is to examine as many behaviors as possible, he says.

It might be possible to catch livestock sickness even earlier, before outward symptoms show up. Like us, farm animals can run a fever or show other unusual temperature fluctuations when the immune system responds to pathogens. That's why Al Schaefer,an animal physiologist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, uses infrared cameras to take cows' temperature. When a cow nears a water station, its RFID chip instructs a camera to take a thermal image of the lacrimal glands in its eyes, which are temperature-sensitive and often heat up with the onset of disease. Schaefer is testing his system at various universities in a proof-of-concept phase, which, if it succeeds, will lead to the production of a commercial prototype. And as with the Newcastle technology, the challenge is to automate the system to instantly alert researchers to cows with elevated temperatures, Schaefer says. "It beats having a room full of college students watching videos and analyzing them."

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